NEW YORK, June 28 — Sarah Lewis studies photography and its power to shape ideas of race and identity with a depth few can match. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, where she is an assistant professor of history of art and architecture and African and African-American studies, she held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern, where she often shaped provocative exhibitions dealing with race, representation and other topics.

Her most recent project has been greeted as even more accessible, conversational and bold: guest-editing a special issue of Aperture devoted to the photography of the black experience.

She titled the issue Vision & Justice (also the name of her course at Harvard) and gave it two separate covers — one contemporary, the other historic. Fans of the hefty edition have been calling it a vital corrective to the so-called white gaze of elite photography, although Lewis prefers to describe it simply as a fully rounded portrait of black life.

An exhibition tied to the theme will open in August at Harvard. In the meantime, Lewis, 36, while travelling between New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, has found herself discussing the power of imagery, especially as it relates to race and the need for greater visual literacy.

Following is a condensed version of a conversation that went on for hours at The New York Times and then continued via email.

As a picture editor at The New York Times, I think a lot about authenticity. I grew up in Wyoming, with very few people of colour, so when my mother saw them in the paper, she’d say, "Why is it that we’re just like these black blobs with eyes and teeth?” It would drive her crazy. And then on my father’s side, they were from central Louisiana, and every time we would visit my grandmother, she would have portraits and photos from back in the 1800s of family members. That’s what drew me to photography. What drew you to photography?

There are almost too many personal stories and anecdotes I have in mind to isolate just one. Actually, there was one formative moment for me as a child that made me think about the gravitas of images connected to how we see race in America.

We had a flood in my house growing up. I was maybe single digits, 8 or 9. And we had to move out of the house. We came home, and it was just flooded. And our neighbour next door — we lived in an entirely white neighbourhood, and we built it — came by to help. And she was just struck still and stopped at the entryway, she didn’t come in, not because of the water, but because she was shocked to see these photographs we had of my great-great-grandparents. And I’ll never forget what she said: "I don’t even have any pictures of my great-great-grandparents.”

And it occurred to me a) that these were unique; b) that there was significance to having a visual record in the form of a photograph of African-Americans in that time period. And it made me want to explore the history and understand that.

How has your interest in photography evolved?

It’s moved from simply interest in it as a documentary enterprise to something that I think has resonance for civic engagement, for broader-level conversation than you have only in the art world. It goes far beyond that.

How did you select the artists that are featured in Vision & Justice?

My aim for this issue of Aperture and selecting the theme of vision and justice was to create an issue that would have writers, photographers, poets, scholars, whose level of mastery and gravitas on work matched the weight of this topic. Nevertheless, that means there are many emerging photographers in here, many younger scholars and writers.

Why two different covers?

I wanted to have two contrasting covers — one by Richard Avedon of Martin Luther King Jr., his father and son, and another portrait by the young photographer Awol Erizku from the Afropunk 2014 festival — to underscore both the historic nature and raw vitality of this topic of vision and justice.

For an issue with such a chronological sweep, no one image would do.

I particularly love the cover with Martin Luther King Jr., his father and his son. I had no idea this photo existed.

I think one out of, say, 20 people — and I’m saying scholars, art historians that I know — knew of this image before I showed it to them.

Avedon so masterfully composed this image. He’s made

King hover above both the past and the present, with his father and son; because of the framing of his shoulders, he’s almost angelic, almost depersonalized, de ——disembodied somehow. But you still see, because of the features, how connected he is with the past and the future.

Ah, but that gaze is I think what hits me, and it emblematizes the importance of vision for justice. I decided to title the issue Vision & Justice, not Photographs & Justice or Images & Justice, because it has to do with this, with the impact of how images get us to see the world differently.

Is there a particular photo in the collection that you’re willing to say is your favourite?

I will say I selected every image. I went back to photographers’ studios often to get the image I knew was really there. So my hand — my fingerprint — is on every single page.

I think people might be surprised that Annie Leibovitz is in here. When I saw a photograph of black supermodels all dressed in black and gathered by Iman that Annie Leibovitz took in 2001, I tore it out of Vanity Fair magazine and taped it right up on my wall.

What struck me was the exquisite grace of these models in the aggregate and how the picture served as a corrective model, a demonstration of the force of photography for representational justice. For any stereotype about a black female identity, power, self-possession or beauty, Annie Leibovitz’s composition of these women, models who have mastered the art of physical gesture to convey an idea in a glance, offered a sharp retort, a collective dare.

I felt just as moved by her picture of Susan Rice, who emblematizes a new association of race and power by sitting at the centre of the UN table as the United States ambassador with effortless poise and preparedness, pencil in one hand on the desk, the other hand coolly draped toward the viewer, resting on the chair as if the world is her audience, because it is.

What are your thoughts about the state of black art and artists — Kehinde Wiley, for example?

The legendary art historian Robert Farris Thompson once said, "Until you know how African you are, you will never know how American you are.” Well, yes. Indeed. As a culture, we’ve begun to recognise what Bob has long been saying with his work. This is part of why it is a particularly rich time for black expressive culture and will remain. In the US, we now know that when we celebrate black culture, we are celebrating American culture. When we honor the pioneering work of artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Romare Bearden, Kehinde Wiley, Jamel Shabazz or Lorna Simpson; extol the poetry by Elizabeth Alexander or Claudia Rankine; the music by Jason Moran; or scholarship on black artists by Richard Powell or Deborah Willis, we are celebrating our collective heritage.

How do you think representation of race has changed over time, especially as we’ve become more of a transnational multicultural society?

The main trend line or shift that’s occurred as it relates to race and photography and representation in photography is that you see a move from photography as a corrective enterprise to photography as a way to celebrate the complexity of human life. Of black life.

By corrective, I mean you really have to go back to the 19th century and talk about the development of race representation in photography because of the way in which racial science attempted to use photography as a mode to show the inhumanity of African-Americans, and all the work that was being done — the counter archive that black photographers in the antebellum period and the Civil War period created to offer a corrective for that.

Again, that’s why [Frederick] Douglass was in front of the camera. It was to create this counter archive, to — as Skip Gates would put it — stem the Niagara flow of stereotypes that had become a mass glut at that period.

So it moved from this corrective period to a more celebratory mode; I think Jamel Shabazz is a great exponent of this, with his honour and dignity series really chronicling black life that might be just quotidian to those people, but isn’t given its due lots of times because of saturation we have of images that show one denigrating cultural narrative about African-Americans.

I think part of the reason why we’re robbed of perspectives when we don’t see the full range of black expression is because there is no one prescriptive way to live this life with black skin. — The New York Times